Looking for a new maintainer for pymb2 and libdiscid

Matthias Friedrich (yalaforge) finds himself with little spare time on his hands these days and has asked me to find a new maintainer for the Python MusicBrainz library (pymusicbrainz2) and for the C based libdiscid library. While libdiscid doesn’t require immediate work, the pymb2 library needs to have support for Release Groups (from the 2009-05-24 server update) added in.

Matthias suggested that anyone interested in becoming the maintainer should write a patch to add the needed release groups support. I think this is a good idea — anyone interested?

If so, please post a comment!

And thanks for your hard work on these projects Matthias!

UPDATE: Our Help Wanted page has been updated to reflect our current needs.

RDF Web Service will cease to exist after the NGS release

The old skool RDF based web service (at /cgi-bin/mq_2_1.pl /cgi-bin/mq.pl /cgi-bin/rdf_2_1.pl and /cgi-bin/rdf.pl) will cease to exist when we release the Next Generation Schema (NGS) release that will go into a beta release on August 31. This web service has been deprecated for three years now, its finally time to put it out if its own misery.

As of this release the Classic Tagger will completely stop functioning. RIP Classic Tagger!

Release groups and ISRC release is complete!

We’ve just finished rolling out our latest release to support Release Groups, ISRCs and CD Stub searching!

For all the details on this release, check out the release notes.
I would like to thank Luks, Dave Evans, Navap, Outsidecontext, Voiceinsideyou, Murdos, Pronik, Prodoc and everyone else who has helped put this release together! Thank you for all your hard work!

P.S. Happy Birthday to Matt Wood!

Release groups & ISRCs: Please help us test this release!

We’ve hammered out many of the rough edges from the upcoming release and now we need your help to test the release to spot any problems that may have slipped past our new code review process.

New in this release:
– Release groups: This allows us to group same titled releases from one artist that have slightly different track lists into release groups. For instance, here is a Weezer release group that has many separate releases in it. We have converted as many batches of releases to release groups as we automatically could, but there are tons left to do. We’ll need your help!
– ISRC support: We can now track ISRC codes. While this is less useful to end users, our commercial customers have been asking for this for eons.
– WikiDocs: Our WikiDocs system now uses our new Mediawiki to pull documentation from.
– Bug fixes from our last release.

Aside from a good chunk of the bug fixes, all of these things are now live on our test server. Please report bugs to our bug tracker and make sure to select the “Server: ReleaseGroups, ISRCs, Bug Fixes” milestone so we can spot your bugs fast. Also take a look at the bugs we’ve already closed for this release and which ones are still outstanding.

We have one major known issue, where some release groups may be found in the search engine, but will give a “release group not found error” (example). This is a known bug.

Finally, do the release groups as we have them now make sense to you? There are a few things that may not be entirely clear, so we’re looking for feedback how to make things more clear before we release this on May 24th.

Release groups, ISRCs and bug fix release: May 24th

The next update of the MusicBrainz server will happen on May 24th. For this update we will have the following new features:

  1. Release groups: Group together like releases (same titled releases by the same artist) into one group.
  2. Support for attaching ISRC codes to tracks.
  3. Bug fixes.

No later than this weekend I will post a call for testing with details on what has changed and what bugs were fixed. Stay tuned!

Summer of Code: Acceptance and projected milestones

I’m pleased to announce that Google’s Summer of Code has announced which projects have been accepted. I’m pleased to let you know that our own Oliver Chalres and Lukáš Lalinský have been accepted to both work on our Next Generation Schema. Congratulations to both of you — this should be an exciting summer!

As the first act of getting ourselves organized for Summer of Code, the three of us have agreed to the following milestone schedule over the summer:

May 25: Object model and read-only user interface in place. This is essentially equivalent to Lukáš’ NGS-p implemented in Catalyst/Template Toolkit based on Oliver’s work from the last year. With this milestone users will be able to convert an existing database to the NGS schema and be able to browse the data in the new schema via the read-only user interface. No editing will be possible at this point in time.

June 29: The basic types are in place for editing artists, labels, and release-groups. Release and track level edits will not be complete.

July 27: Release and release related edit-types will be in place, but without a complete UI. The release edits will take a lot of work to get right so, we’ll have these edits in place, but may not be able to finish a working UI for them.

Aug 31: All remaining edit types are in place and the NGS enabled server enters a final beta phase.

Note that SoC doesn’t officially start until May 23 — we’re not wasting any time — in face our first milestone is due 2 days after SoC starts. Can you tell we’re serious this year?